What is Connected Home or Smart Home? Explained by 4 Questions
What is connected home? Let’s start with a concrete example. You left your house in a hurry to catch your train, and now a lot of questions are tapping you: have I turned off the heater? The light? Did I close the door?
Imagine if on the way, you could turn your whole house into “absence” mode from your mobile phone – Heating down, bulbs off and lock well locked, all in one click. This is the use case of the connected home.
The list of connected home possibilities is infinite. Almost all objects in our everyday life can become connected objects.
1. What is connected home?
A connected home means that you will be able to orchestrate, even remotely, the behaviours of the equipment in your dwelling to simplify your life, save or improve your comfort.
It is not magic but rather to retrieve information and circulate it among your different objects.
By connecting sensors to your equipment, the equipment data is then collected, analyzed and used to support automated actions. The objects are able to exchange information too via connections.
Does it get too technical? Do not worry; let’s leave an example that will speak to you surely.
It is 7 o’clock in the morning; your alarm clock takes you out of Morpheus’ arms, but … a few minutes before it sent the order to your espresso machine to prepare you a hot coffee, which is able to detect a tank of capsules soon empty and to automatically order recharges via the app that is on your mobile.
2. Home automation, smart home, connected home: what difference?
We get lost! There is no formal definition but here are some elements that should allow you to see more clearly.
Home automation is the “ancestor” of the connected home. You probably know the switch to close all the roller shutters in the house or the light in front of the door that lights up when you go home. In such cases, the intervention of man is necessary for the action to take place.
Connected home is a more recent term that refers to controlling equipment in your dwelling in a programmed way via an application or via an object. It is possible to “graft” external services, such as the supply of energy, to your steering system.
Smart home is somehow an “extension” of the connected home.
In this case, the data, in addition to being collected and formatted, are integrated into algorithms that will anticipate behaviours (anticipate your heating needs at such as the time of day depending on your previous behaviour, the weather of the day, etc.).
Hence the use of the term “smart”. In reality, your home will be more and more comfortable
3. Why is it time to enter the connected home?
All the conditions are now combined so that the connected home is no longer reserved for some high-tech adventurers.
For most of us, home is now equipped with Internet and Wi-Fi connection, and smartphones always stay with us.
This equipment is closely linked to the technical prowess that continues to progress both on the Internet and data (increase in processing power, analysis and storage capacities). All this facilitates the connectivity of objects.
4. With the home connected, do I give access to my data?
From the moment the objective is to connect as many objects as possible to obtain a maximum number of services, of course you are transmitting more and more data.
But that’s something you’ve always been doing, perhaps without being aware of it. When you paid by credit card, called with a mobile phone, or viewed websites on the Internet, you were sharing information about yourself (your location, your interests, your consumption habits, etc.).
So the point of vigilance is more about knowing who your data is uploaded and how it is being used.
